The Beresfords (38 page)

“What do you mean? I’m in Colorado. Isn’t she with you? I was calling about Tom.”

“Tom?”

For heaven’s sake—I thought I was out of it. If Caroline could hear Greg she would have something unflattering to say about his mental grasp, I was sure. “Tom,” I repeated. “Her brother Tom. He’s been in a car accident.”

“That’s too bad. Bad,” he muttered. “Too bad. I need to hang up now. I need to keep the line open in case she calls.”

“But—”

But nothing. He was gone. Unbelievable! Frustrated, I flopped back on my mother’s bed, my hair fanning over the pink chenille spread while I stared at the popcorn ceiling. Now I was really confused. Had Greg somehow managed to lose track of his wife? In any case, he clearly had neither interest nor compassion to spare for a brother-in-law, and I wasn’t brave enough to ring again. After a minute I rolled onto my stomach, leafing through my address book for Julie’s number. It was from last year, but it was worth a try.

No luck. The new owner of the phone number who answered had never heard of Julie Beresford and had no idea where she could be reached. When I said she was a student at Boston U, he said I could try the registrar, but that that information was confidential and he doubted they’d give it out. So did I.

Another dead end.

No wonder Jonathan and Aunt Terri asked me to pray. There was nothing left for me to do.

I not only prayed, I fasted. Not dinner, because Mom might have noticed, and I didn’t want to talk about it. But breakfast and lunch and snacks. My stomach rumbled, and when it did I would mouth,
Please, God, may Tom get better
!

I escaped to the library to pore over my Bible, scouring it for verses that promised God would heal Tom. There weren’t any. Sometimes people got better and sometimes they died.

I made bargains:
Father, if you heal Tom, I’ll try a hundred times as hard to love Caroline, and I’ll never think about Jonathan
that
way ever, ever again. If you heal Tom, I’ll pray for half an hour every day. More—forty-five minutes. If you heal Tom, I’ll stay in Colorado for as long as you like.

I knew in my head that this wasn’t how it worked. That, if Tom recovered, it wouldn’t be because I skipped my bowl of cornflakes or because fifteen extra minutes of prayer clinched it. But I couldn’t help it hoping it would.

I sat by the phone, my heart leaping whenever it rang. If I went out, because a watched pot never boils, I would cross my fingers mentally when I returned, wishing and wishing Mom would say, “Your aunt Terri called again, Fran.” She didn’t.

In my desperation, I made a counseling appointment with the pastor. The church I went to had a small staff, so I was afraid he would be too busy, but his secretary pitied me and squeezed me in.

Pastor Tim was a short, square man with glasses and a shiny bald head fringed by a ruffle of gray-blond hair. To judge from the décor in his office, his love for Jesus and for golf ran about neck and neck.

“What’s on your mind, Francine? You’re new to our church family, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Please—no ‘sir’ necessary.”

“Yes, sir. I mean, yes—” I managed. “I’ve been coming for a couple months now. I grew up in California with my aunt and uncle and cousins, but now I’m back with my mother and stepfather.”

“But I’ve seen you with some kids, sometimes.”

“My half-brother and –sister. They started coming with me about a month ago. They like it here.” Understatement. Robbie and Jamie, in their desire to know where I went every Sunday morning, insisted on accompanying me. Mom shrugged her permission. They loved it from the first—the games, the playground, the singing. Robbie got in trouble once for punching another kid during a NASCAR argument, and once Jamie threw up her graham crackers and fruit punch, but otherwise things went smoothly. Their eager company made me feel less lonely and odd, and answering their all-over-the-map questions about God reminded me of when I was young and plied Jonathan with the same.

Pastor Tim nodded. “We’re glad to have them. So, you’re in high school?”

“Yes, s—yes. I hope to graduate this fall.”

“And then what?”

“I—I don’t know. Get a job, I guess. Back in California I already have one. Or—here—if I don’t go back.” My voice broke. “I—I—I really wish I was there right this second.”

Pastors recognize the look. I’m convinced. The look of someone who is just about to lose it—the hairline crack in a person’s emotional dam that presages complete and cataclysmic structural failure.
That
look. Pastor Tim recognized it, at least. He leapt from his chair, setting it spinning, and threw himself across the room, closing his door most of the way and nodding at Charlotte his secretary to close her door to the outside hall. I didn’t mind Charlotte hearing my breakdown—she had a sneak preview when I made the appointment.

Out it all came. Not just Tom’s accident—everything. And not in any logical order, either.
Everything
. The car accident. My exile. Not being able to talk to anyone about it. Feeling forgotten and abandoned. How Tom and Marcy drank a lot. Tom always drank a lot. As long as I could remember. What if he didn’t make it? Then there was Jonathan. I always loved Jonathan. He wanted to be a pastor but not anymore. Jonathan and Caroline. That summer we met the Grants. Eric and Rachel. Jonathan’s wedding. Eric and me. Uncle Paul. Far away. Hardly hearing a word from anyone though I wrote and wrote. Tom again. Mom and Bill. Not fitting in with the Dawes’ but not being welcome with the Beresfords. Jonathan.

When I talked myself out, hiccupping to a stop and reaching for the conveniently-placed Kleenex, Pastor Tim sat back in his chair, rocking it slightly, his gaze fixed on the figurine perched on the corner of his desk. It was of a golfer on his hands and knees, trying to blow the ball into the hole.

“Well, that’s quite a burden you’ve been carrying,” he said after a while. “A lot for anyone, not just for a girl your age. I’m sorry about your cousin’s drinking problem and his accident and for how helpless you feel, this far away.” He waited for me to blow my nose again
before continuing. “Sounds like you’re telling me you’ve always felt a little on the outside, whether you were here or there. And maybe the people you’ve loved the most haven’t loved you back the way you hoped they would.”

I clutched the sodden tissues, giving one short nod.

“There’s a verse I’m thinking of,” said Pastor Tim. With one foot he prodded the trash can toward me. The tissues dropped in, swallowed by crumpled papers and a few gum wrappers. When I looked up again, he had his Bible open, a
leatherbound
New International Version in Pastor Black. “Psalm 27. Here it is: ‘Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me.’” He sighed. “That one verse always meant a lot to me because my folks got divorced, way back when no one’s parents got divorced. Have you heard that one, Frannie?”

I nodded again. Growing up with Aunt Terri, I’d read the Bible cover to cover and memorized a decent amount of it.

“Good. That means we just have to pray for the words to go from your head to your heart. When you understand that you are never alone—
never
—that lonely feeling gets transformed into something else.”

He paused while I turned this over in my head. Into what? The loneliness had only ever been loneliness, pure and simple.
Though my father and mother and aunts and uncles and cousins forsake me, the Lord will receive me
.

“When David writes that psalm, he’s under attack from his enemies and there aren’t any friends or family nearby. It’s just him against everyone, he thinks. But he knows better, in his head. He tells God, ‘My heart says of you, “Seek his face! Your face,
Lord,
I will seek.’ You get it? Loneliness and abandonment become a yearning for God, for the one who will never abandon him. Desire to belong gets transformed into desire to see God.
Because
you see, people will let us down, Francine. They hurt us, they leave us, they forget us. But not the Lord. He says he will never leave us nor forsake us—Deuteronomy. That’s why, when the enemies close in, that’s who David wants to see.”

“But—” I still had my bald-honest hat on— “that’s David. ‘A man after God’s own heart.’ I don’t care about God sometimes, Pastor Tim. I don’t want him. He’s invisible and doesn’t say a whole lot. I want people.”

“Doesn’t say a whole lot! If I wrote a book as long as the Bible, I don’t think many people would accuse me of not saying a lot.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. Sometimes the other voices are so loud in our heads that we can’t hear God’s. And as for preferring people to an invisible god who dwells in unapproachable light, well, I can’t blame you there. Let’s pray for you that God makes his presence more real, more tangible, like he did for David. David wouldn’t have wanted him either, if God was just a distant concept like that.”

I sighed. Pastor Tim had to say stuff like this, I supposed.
God will comfort you. God is always with you
. It was part of the job description. “Maybe God isn’t paying attention to me
because I’m no big deal. David was his chosen king, and he was at war. I’m just Frannie, and I don’t have any enemies threatening the future of his people.”

“No enemies! We all have enemies, Francine.”

My mouth dropped open involuntarily. Oh, dear. I hoped he wasn’t one of those paranoid types. He seemed normal enough.

“No enemies?” he repeated. “You don’t think that’s an enemy, when you tell yourself you’re forgotten, abandoned, unloved? That those names for yourself aren’t an assault of some kind? Enemies camped around you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s pray,” he commanded abruptly. Before I knew it, he’d circled the desk and hollered for Charlotte to join us. She marched in, smoothing down her skirt and dropping a few pink, While-You-Were-Out messages by his computer monitor. All in a day’s work for her.

“Do you want to pray too, Francine, or would you rather Charlotte and I did it?”

“You, please.” I smiled apologetically at Charlotte and she winked at me behind her bifocals.

I could see why he liked to pray with her, besides the where-two-or-three-are-gathered-in-my-name stipulation. Charlotte accompanied each thunderous acclamation of Pastor Tim with
Amens
or
Yes, Lords
, often giving my shoulder an encouraging squeeze. Pastor Tim’s square hand pressed the top of my head like he would shove better thoughts into it, Holy Spirit or no Holy Spirit. No one had ever prayed for me before like this. Not even Tammy, and I thought she was out of the box.

“Father God, we come before you with our sister Francine today” (
Yes, Lord!
) “to ask that you shelter her in this day of trouble,” (
Amen!
) “that you lift her head up above her enemies
round about
and set her high on a rock!” (Squeeze.
Yes, Lord.
) “We pray you obliterate the slanders of her enemies! Destroy them utterly! No more will she be called ‘Forgotten’—” (
Amen!
) “‘Abandoned’— ‘Unloved’!” (Squeeze.) “In Jesus you have given her new names! Like Abram who you called Abraham, or Jacob, who you called Israel. Like Simon, who you called Peter. In your sight, Lord, she has new names. In your sight she is called ‘Confident’” (
Amen!
) “She is called ‘Precious’! She is called ‘Chosen.’” (
Yes, Lord. Amen! Hallelujah.
B-
i
-g squeeze.) They went on in this vein for ten minutes, at least. When Pastor Tim got done casting down my enemies and asking God to show his face to me in a way I experienced tangibly, when he was done pleading that God’s word would come alive for me and fill me with life, he went on to pray for my family. For blessing and God’s will to be done in Tom’s life. In Marcy’s. In Jonathan’s and Caroline’s and Eric’s and Rachel’s. If he didn’t remember a name, he barreled onward with a “you know who I mean, Lord.” And then he wound up with a blessing. That the Lord would be my light and salvation, my stronghold; that I could dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life; that God would teach me; that he would lead me on a level path; that I would see the goodness of the Lord and be filled with courage and strength.

When it was over, despite my head pressed down into my neck and my shoulder squeezed probably black and blue, I felt light as a balloon. Like I might float away, high, high up
into the heaven-blue Colorado sky and never come back down, just floating forever with a silly grin on my face. Nothing had changed—Tom still lay in a hospital bed far away and who knew if anyone would remember to call me again—and yet everything had changed. I bounced up, enveloping Charlotte in a hug and reaching to grasp Pastor Tim’s hand. “Thank you,” I whispered. “That helped me. Thank you for praying for me.”

“I have an assignment for you, too, Francine,” said Pastor Tim, as Charlotte patted me on the back and bustled from the office, like nothing wondrous had just happened.

“Anything!”

“Memorize Psalm 27. Pray through it. Ask God to let it go from your head to your heart. Start tonight. And then let me know how it’s going sometime.”